My First ISS Image

[Matty P]

Last night, I finally had an opportunity to image the International Space Station. This was the first time I had attempted to image the ISS so I was a little bit nervous but at the same time excited.

This ISS passing was a magnificent magnitude -2.3 reaching a maximum elevation of about 60° overhead.

On the dot of 8:56pm the ISS appeared through the trees. This was a very bright passing so I was a bit unsure of the right exposure settings to use. I went with a 1/900sec exposure time with the gain set at maximum with the DMK shooting at 60fps. I aligned the RDF the best I could earlier so I had the best chance of getting the ISS on the CCD chip. Out of about 12,000 frames , I captured only around 120 frames with the ISS on it.

WOW! What a rush. I did not realise how hard it was to image an object that moves very quickly through the sky. It sure was fun though.

I think for a first attempt, I did pretty well. The images were a little bit over exposed due to a bit of uncertainty. Even though the image is not that sharp, (probably due to bad focusing) I am very pleased with the results.

In the image posted, are all single frames unprocessed from the AVI.

P.S. I am going to try to make an animated GIF, I will post the results.

Thanks for looking and Enjoy! :thumbsup:

[madtuna]

Brilliant!! :thumbsup:
looking forward to the avi

what annoyed the hell out of me was 180kms up the road from you it was clouded over and we missed it

[Matty P]

Thanks Madtuna, :thumbsup:

What a shame that you missed it. I was very lucky to have some clear skies yesterday at the time of the passing.

[h0ughy]

well done Matt, fantastic effort. Have you passed that onto Spaceweather - RB has his shot in there too.

[Matty P]

Thanks Houghy, :thumbsup:

I'll send it off to Spaceweather, see what happens? :shrug:

[RB]

Matty that is a fantastic first shot of the ISS !!!

Well done, looking forward to more and also the anim.

:thumbsup:

[davidpretorius]

yes it is very exciting and scary..........there is only a short time and you hope to hell you have got everything right (camera cover off, camera on, laptop on, camera plugged into laptop etc etc)

well done this is really really good

[Screwdriverone]

Matty,

WE ARE NOT WORTHY!!!!!!!!

Excellent job! - Hats off.

Chris

[Matty P]

Thanks Andrew, Dave and Chris. :thumbsup:

I am still baffled that out of 12,000 frames only 120 has the ISS on it. :scared:
I can't wait to try it again. :)

[iceman]

Excellent first result, Matt!

[Matty P]

Here's the animation of the ISS. :thumbsup:

The animation is a bit all over the shop but it shows a small amount of rotation.

Enjoy! :)

[Ric]

Well done Matty, a great first capture.

I also liked the animation as well.

Cheers

[Meadehead]

Well done :thumbsup:

I know how difficult that must have been as I have only tried to track it for the first time on Monday but couldn't even get it in my FOV!

How did you track it? manually

[Matty P]

Thanks John, :thumbsup:

I tracked it manually through my RDF. It was really just point and hope for the best. :lol: Thinking about it... I must of been pretty lucky. :D